Fruznensky District Court of Yaroslavl began consideration of the case against employees of SIZO-1 Spartak Lubovsky and Alexander Burtsev, who are accused of beating prisoner Viktor Kharlamov, whose spleen later was removed due to the received injuries. This was reported to Mediazona by reported the movement Za Prava Cheloveka (For Human Rights).

According to the case file on the court's website, the hearings began in mid-July, and the defendants are accused of abuse of authority with the use of violence, which resulted in grave consequences (clauses "a" and "c" of part 3 of Article 286 CCRF) and causing serious harm to health committed by an organized group (clause "a" of part 3 of Article 111 CCRF). Kharlamov was placed in SIZO-1 in April 2016.

“Upon admission, all my belongings were taken from me and were not returned for five days. I asked them to give them back, for which I got beaten,” he says. “Me and two other prisoners who were with me in quarantine were taken to the search room, where there were no video cameras, and all three beaten in turn. My fault was requesting to return my belongings and the other just to keep me a company.”

According to him, the employees of the SIZO beat him with truncheons; for three days, he was lying with internal bleeding but the doctor claimed that he was pretending. After hospitalization in the city hospital, his spleen was removed – according to the extract, the organ was ruptured due to internal abdominal trauma.

As the human rights activists note, the other victims along with Kharlamov were Anton Lebedev and Sergey Suvorov. Coming out of the prison, they began to seek justice against the law enforcers but Lebedev died soon.

The case was initiated in March 2017; Kharlamov had already been sent to Rybinsk IR-12.

Earlier in the summer, several employees of Yaroslavl IK-1 were arrested after a video of the beating of a prisoner was published. Reports of torture in this colony appeared earlier but investigators did not find confirmation to this data.